Developing techniques to better quantify, track and more accurately describe the impact of federally funded research is quickly becoming a reputable domain for information studies, including data curation. In previous papers we’ve suggested the adaptation of an existing Data Use Index to quantify data use in the Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In this poster we revisit those indicators to determine their ability to forecast or indicate changes in data use over time. Central to our exploration of these indicators is an economic approach to quantifying data use, which holds that patterns in data repository events (downloads, searches, browsing etc.) should be capable of both predicting and explaining variations in data use over time. We present preliminary results from this analysis and conclude with some prospects for future work with macroeconomic indicators.